5 Steps To A Successful Content Marketing Campaign

New pieces of content are being created and shared all the time. In the growing industry of content marketing, more competition will be entering your space and working to overthrow you. The question you need to ask yourself is, “Is my content better?”

What can separate you in any industry, is the quality of content that you produce and distribute. Your product can have the winning formula that everyone can benefit from, but instead, potential customers are running to a Ma and Pa company, Jack & Irma’s Magic Phones, because they market better. If you can create a piece of content that captures the attention of your target market and has a viral element to it, you can thrive in any industry saturated with competition. Follow these simple steps and your next piece of content will rock!

1. Identify Topic’s in Your Industry

To have a quality piece of content, look at the trending topics or pain points in your industry. You can create a wonderful eBook about the “Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Website” and have it under-perform because it doesn’t include a trending topic on industry news or solves pain points. Instead, you may create the “Ultimate Guide to Protecting Yourself from Mobilegeddon.” You still offer your expertise in relaying how to optimize websites, but now you’re tying it to industry news that may have high engagement from your target audience.

2. Know Your Buyers Journey Stage

Every possible customer is at a different stage in the buying process. They may have just become aware of your industry or they may be looking to purchase a service and want to know what’s the best product out there. Every piece of content should be created with your buyer persona in mind and where they are at in the buyers journey process. When you know who you’re targeting and their journey stage, then you will know what piece of content to create. For instance, a buyer who is thinking to purchase may not look at an eBook, which is catered toward the buyers in the awareness stage. Instead, create a case study, which provides information that may help the buyer in their decision to choose your product/service.

3. Create Shareable Content

There can be many well-written and wonderfully informative pieces of content that lack elements of virality, causing them to only be seen by a small amount of your target market. Remember that even if there is a lot of information that you need to share, it is best to keep your content succinct. Your target market is most likely busy, and will respond best with easy to read content. You can have your content be educational, but also easy to consume. First, you need to focus on making the writing skimmable and engaging, then you can knock it out of the park with design

4. Know Where to Distribute

Once you have your content ready to throw out to the masses, you need to figure out where your masses will be. Know Your Audience. The better knowledge and understanding you have of your target market, the better your distribution can be. If you know the demographic and psychographics of your market, you’ll know whether a Facebook ad, Twitter ad, LinkedIn ad, email, Google Adwords, etc. will reach the largest percentage of your buyers. You’ll need to put the same, if not more, planning into where and how you’ll distribute. Once you have your distribution channels set up and ready, then fire away.

5. Measure Your Results

Once your campaigns are live, A/B test. Be sure to only test one thing at a time, because if you have multiple changes to several variants, you may not know what change was the winning factor that increased your conversion rate. Do this across several platforms of distribution. If you see what ads performed better, use their success as benchmarks. Track your landing page visitors, track your conversions, track your leads, track your ad engagements/interactions, track everything you possibly can. You can never have too much data about your campaigns. If you are able to track the engagements and conversions of a single lead through their entire buying process, then your sales team will know what content performed better and have tremendously higher close rates.

There can be a lot of steps to creating a piece of content that can be considered a masterpiece. But if you take the time to follow these simple steps, you’ll be on your way to becoming a rockstar in your industry. And for those who love rock and roll, I salute you.